Leukocytes, while naturally collected along with other cellular elements in a whole blood collection, are considered a contaminant of other cellular blood components (red blood cells and platelets), and have increasingly been recognized as a contributor to, if not the cause of, a number of adverse consequences of blood transfusion:

●Immunologically-mediated effects

●Infectious disease transmission

●Reperfusion injury

Immunologically mediated effects are by far the most common, including:

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